


Intergration

by Panterest6981



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Drabble Collection, Gen, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 17:50:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13641381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Panterest6981/pseuds/Panterest6981
Summary: Bucky Barnes comes to Avengers Tower. What exactly does this mean to the other occupants of said Tower?Individual chapters are stand alone drabbles.





	Intergration

**Author's Note:**

> So I was reading a story recently about Bucky Barnes coming to live at the Tower after Winter Soldier and though it wasn't the focus of the story, I couldn't help but wonder how would the team react to him as an individual, irrespective of their existing relationship with Steve

Natasha tried very hard not to think about her time with the Red Room. The years she spent there felt less like her childhood and more like a training montage. She had long since blocked out the vast majority of it and only the highest victories and the lowest punishments still haunted her nightmares. 

Funny how the Soldier featured so heavily in both. 

Physical combat was only a small part of the lessons she and her sisters had been forced to endure, but it was the one that she had feared the most and had to work the most to succeed at.

At their first lesson the Soldier had snapped the neck of one her sisters, her name long since blocked from memory. It hadn’t been the first time one of them had been dismissed from the room but it was the first time the remaining girls had witnessed the killing. It was the sheer emptiness of the Soldiers eyes that had stuck with her the most. Strange how his seemed no different from the eyes of her dead sister.

Though she generally tried to avoid it, when looked back now with the eyes of an adult, knowing what James Barnes has suffered, she recognised the damaged he must have endured to be like that. At the time though, he was simply a monster.

His lessons were both the hardest, because even with his enhancements he never went easy on them, and the simplest because combat was so straightforward. 

Sometimes it would take weeks before her wound would heal and though the pain from her wounds never went away she soon learned to move her body as if she felt nothing. 

Once, she had missed a shot in a final assessment and found herself flat on her back before she could realise her mistake. But where she expected him to take the killing blow instead he paused and just looked at her. She thought he said the name Becky but she wasn’t sure. He had vanished from their training after that.

When Steve had recognised his friend Bucky in the face of the Soldier, Natasha had been horrified. She didn’t want her monster to have a name. She didn’t want him to have been a victim too. The Soldier wasn’t a person, he was a demon with no name and no soul. 

There was a part of her that still shivered with fear when she thought of the Soldier. But she wasn’t that little girl any more. As an adult she could recognise that he was as much a puppet of Red Room as she was then, and ultimately, they had destroyed him even more thoroughly than they did her. 

Still, she had a hard time separating Bucky from the Soldier. He was her bogeyman. The nightmare from the deep. She wanted him dead for what he did to her, for what he reminded her of. But she also wanted to help him be free as she was freed. 

When the Soldier (Bucky) came to live in the Tower, Steve beamed with joy. Bucky (Soldier) was a part of his past that he wanted to keep, to remember and bring back. She made a silent promise to him that she would never tell him about the little girl that the Soldier (Bucky) killed. She would never tell him about the monster he had been.

She wasn’t a little girl any more. She was strong, fierce, independent. Bucky (Soldier) didn’t frighten her any more. 

(And she could not still hear the sound of Tanya’s neck snapping in a pitiless metal grip. The Red Room had trained her well.)

****

The Soldier didn’t remember Natasha from before. He wouldn’t have connected the beautiful red head in front of him to the small child he had trained in Russia even if he had still possessed those memories.

Bucky remembered though. He remembered the horror in their eyes as they looked at him, the fear they tried so hard to disguise. He remembered the sound of his fists hitting their little bodies. He remembered barking orders at them, to get up, ignore the pain, move faster.

He doesn’t remember when he stopped training them. He doesn’t remember leaving the Red Room and he doesn’t remember shooting Natasha in the stomach years later to get to his target. He believes her though when she tells him he did.

They seem to have made an agreement not to discuss their shared past. He’s not even sure if Steve knows they knew each other. He thinks the archer knows. Some of it at least. But he’s taking his cues from Natasha and pretending it never happened. 

Steve of course is completely oblivious to the tension. But then Steve is oblivious to a lot of things. 

Bucky’s a little afraid of Natasha. She looks at him sometimes with death in her eyes, even as she smiles at him. He doesn’t know if it’s his death or someone else’s. He knows he owes her a debt he can’t repay. He hopes she never asks him to. He hopes she does.


End file.
